Supercomputing in Wired

Wired’s Gadget Lab ran a story last week on the impact of personal supercomputing on individual scientists

About a year ago John Stone, a senior research programmer at the University of Illinois, and his colleagues found a way to bypass the long waits for computer time at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

…“Now instead of taking a couple of days and waiting in a queue, we can do the calculations locally,” says Stone. “We can do more and better science.”

The emphasis in this story is on NVIDIA’s own brand of GPU-based personal supercomputing, though of course there are other options. And personal these days can mean anything from a desktop with a couple Tesla cards to a deskside CX-1 from Cray.

And here is the most important reason why personal supercomputing of all stripes matters to the world at large

It also means that research projects that typically would have never get off the ground because they are deemed too costly and too resource and time intensive now get the green light. “The cost of making a mistake is much lower and a lot less intimidating,” says Stone.

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team splits on the topic of Net Neutrality. The FCC will soon publish its new rules for ensuring an even playing field for Internet Bandwidth. "Dan doesn't like the idea one bit. Henry disagrees and thinks we need Net Neutrality to keep the Comcasts of the world from running amok. As for Rich, he just finds the whole argument rather amusing since it's pretty much a done deal." [Read More...]